A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Do you need to delay the starting date of a task until another task has finished? That’s a link relationship! This video shows how to create that link relationship, and what they look like in a Gantt chart.
Watch for the words Predecessor and Successor. Those are important labels we give to tasks that precede and to tasks that succeed others. In other words, upstream and downstream tasks… before and after.
Predecessors and Successors are important for scheduling jobs and tasks.
Part 2 of the automated job scheduling series goes deeper into workstation and task configuration. Watch the video below and try it for yourself.
Learn how to automatically assign tasks to workstations or machines for job scheduling. This video shows how “Skills” or machine purposes, or kinds of work are used to assign tasks to machines so that jobs are scheduled to run at the next available time slots.
Got a hot job that needs to run now? There’s a menu command for that.
How about a low-priority job? There’s a menu command for that.
Get inspiration to schedule jobs with the quick video below.
Here’s an easy way to create new work orders in Standard Time®. The “Project Assistant” in this video steps through all the pages of a new project.
And did you know, once you have created a project, you can create a copy from it? Creating a duplicate of an existing project is even simpler. Just right-click on any project and choose Duplicate! Now you have a new work order that is ready to scan!
Watch this video for inspiration. 🙂
Follow these steps to prep a new job for the shop floor. Once prepped, employees can scan the job name and tasks. A timer will start. They can scan again to stop that timer. Now you’ve got timestamped records of all employee working on jobs.
You may have hundreds of project and thousands of tasks for engineering and production. This video shows how to manage those tasks in a calendar. Specifically, a graphical calendar that displays tasks on dates and hours of the day. Drag and drop tasks to various dates to manage start and finish dates. Then view a bar chart of future manpower efforts in what we call the “Resource Allocation” chart.
This video uses the Standard Time cloud test site.
Manufacturing reports include everything from employee activity to detailed KPI’s. How do you customize these reports in Standard Time® for your purposes? With custom fields. These fields may contain the results of barcode scans, automated input, or manual entry. However the data arrives, they are included on reports using this method.
Watch the video and try it yourself!
How do your manufacturing managers know which orders are running on which assembly lines? Got software for that? Yeah? Then you’re good to go!
Software to track orders in manufacturing is called an MRP. What’s an MRP?
An MRP is a manufacturing resource planner. It is used to plan and schedule resources like assembly lines, equipment, materials, and even human resources. I.e. employees.
Standard Time® is an MRP. It tracks projects and orders on assembly lines. Or, if you don’t have assembly lines it tracks orders through your manufacturing facility. Find out where each order is, what status it is in right now, and how much work is left to go.
Watch the video and then give it a try.
Question: How do you organize and report on manufacturing projects? That is to say, what criteria groups projects into working buckets? Do you put them into portfolios so you can see which portfolio performs best? Or set the status of projects to report on stages or phases? How about assign them to assembly lines to see slots where new projects can go? Those are all techniques described in the video below. Plus, there are a few more.
Did you know you can try these project organization techniques today? Download a copy of Standard Time® and try them for free. You might become inspired to learn more about your own projects and find that organizing them simplifies the monolithic list you have now.
Use your “stuff” the best way possible in manufacturing. Haha, that’s one way to put it! This is just a quickie video to help introduce and explain resource allocation. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, this little video might help. And, it’s always worth hearing another perspective if you’re an “old salt” in the project management industry.
Manufacturing resource planners, like Standard Time® make light work of this kind of project management. And, they’re not bad at collecting actuals from the factory floor. E.g. actuals like time, materials, inventory usage, machine hours, and tool usage. Consider taking a look.